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3 on READING the TRACTATUS RESOLUTELY Reply to Meredith Williams and Peter Sullivan 3 ON READING THE TRACTATUS RESOLUTELY Reply to Meredith Williams and Peter Sullivan James Conant and Cora Diamond 1. Introductory remarks Wittgenstein gives voice to an aspiration that is central to his later philosophy, well before he becomes later Wittgenstein, when he writes in §4.112 of the Tractatus that philosophy is not a matter of putting forward a doctrine or a theory, but consists rather in the practice of an activity – an activity he goes on to charac- terize as one of elucidation or clarification – an activity which he says does not result in philosophische Sätze, in propositions of philosophy, but rather in das Klarwerden von Sätzen, in our attaining clarity in our relation to the sentences of our language that we call upon to express our thoughts.1 To say that early Wittgenstein already aspired to such a conception of philosophy is not to gainsay that to aspire to practice philosophy in such a manner and to succeed in doing so are not the same thing. It is therefore not to deny that, by Wittgenstein’s later lights, the Tractatus is to be judged a work that is marked by forms of failure tied to its having failed fully to live up to such an aspiration. But if it is thus to be judged, then it is to some degree a failure even by Wittgenstein’s own earlier lights. This means that if one wants to understand the fundamental turn in Wittgenstein’s thinking as he moves from his earlier to his later philosophy, and why it is that he wanted the Tractatus to be published and read together with Philosophical Investigations, one needs to understand what sort of failure this is – and that requires coming to terms with the Tractatus’s own understanding of what sort of work it was trying to be. We think that readers of the Tractatus – be they admirers or detractors of Wittgenstein – have, on the whole, failed to do this. In our own efforts to try to do this, we have been led to a way of reading the Tractatus that has come to be known as ‘resolute’.2 Most criticisms of resolute readings of the Tractatus are meant to show that, despite the attractions of such readings, the standard sort of reading is preferable. This has led to a controversy in which both critics and fans of such a resolute way of reading the book have 46 ON READING THE TRACTUS RESOLUTLEY tended in their attacks and defenses to speak of ‘the resolute reading’.3 Though the word ‘resolute’ is not a term either of us originally employed to characterize our manner of reading the Tractatus, we are happy to accept it as aptly encapsu- lating certain general features of our reading. But it is important to see that the features of a reading that make it appropriate for it to be thus characterized are of quite a general nature, sufficiently so as to leave a great many questions about just how the Tractatus ought to be read in detail unanswered. There is no reason why there should not be a variety of resolute readings. Indeed, as more and more scholars of Wittgenstein’s work come to find themselves dissatisfied with the standard sort of reading, and especially now that some of them are also drawn to the possibility of a resolute alternative – and as our own continuing attempts, partly prompted by this recent explosion of work on the Tractatus, to think through our earlier suggestions about how to read the book have led us to reformulate and sometimes rethink some of the details of our own reading – it is becoming evident not only that a variety of resolute readings is possible, but that Tractatus scholarship is entering a stage in which that possibility is actual.4 So a resolute reading is better thought of as a program for reading the book, and not only for the reason just given (namely, that a variety of such readings is possible) but also because conformity to the basic features of such a reading leaves undetermined exactly how a great deal of the book works in detail. To be a resolute reader is to be committed at most to a certain programmatic concep- tion of the lines along which those details are to be worked out, but it does not deliver a general recipe for reading the book – a recipe that one could apply to the various parts of the book in anything like a straightforward or mechanical way.5 And we do not apologize for this. For we think that this is just how it should be. There should be no substitute for the hard task of working through the book on one’s own. A resolute reading does not aim to provide a skeleton key for unlocking the secrets of the book in a manner that would transform the ladder into an elevator; so that one just has to push a button (say, one labeled ‘austere nonsense’) and one will immediately be caused to ascend to Tractarian heights, without ever having to do any ladder-climbing on one’s own. There are two interrelated general features that suffice to make a reading ‘resolute’, in the sense of that term that we are concerned with here. The first is that it does not take those propositions of the Tractatus about which Wittgenstein said, at §6.54, that they are to be recognized as ‘nonsensical’ to convey ineffable insights.6 The second feature is a rejection of the idea that what such recognition requires on the part of a reader of the Tractatus is the application of a theory of meaning that has been advanced in the body of the work – a theory that speci- fies the conditions under which a sentence makes sense and the conditions under which it does not. (Notice: both of these features of a resolute reading say some- thing about how the book ought not to be read, thereby still leaving much undetermined about how the book ought to be read.) Taken together, these features rule out two central interrelated features of the (standard) sort of reading, according to which the truths of the theory supposedly advanced in the 47 CORA DIAMOND AND JAMES CONANT body of the book prescribing what can and cannot make sense are themselves supposed to be necessarily ineffable. It is a corollary of the second of these features that a resolute reading is committed to rejecting the idea that the Tractatus holds that there are two logi- cally distinct kinds of nonsense: the garden-variety kind (cases of which we are able to identify prior to our initiation into the teachings of the Tractatus) and a logically more sophisticated kind (the nonsensicality of which is due to their logi- cally internally flawed character). Resolute readings are committed to rejecting not only various previously fashionable accounts of the details of Wittgenstein’s putative theory of why the sentences of philosophers are afflicted with a special sort of nonsensicality, but also any subsequent account that attributes to the author of the Tractatus an indefeasible commitment to a theory of this sort. From the vantage of a resolute reader, it makes little difference whether the account given of the supposed theory be one that rests on an appeal to verifiability, bipo- larity, logical syntax, or some other putative respect in which ‘philosophical propositions’ are to be identified as nonsensical because of having been put together in some special kind of logically or conceptually illegitimate manner. All such accounts will qualify equally as instances of an irresolute reading, if they are committed to ascribing to the Tractatus a theory which its author must endorse and rely upon (if he is to be able to prosecute his program of philosoph- ical critique) and yet which he must also regard as nonsense (if he thinks through the commitments of his own theory).7 Many critics of resolute readings notice that resolute readers are committed to one or another of the corollaries of this second feature, without ever managing to get this second feature itself clearly into view. Such critics notice that resolute readers are committed to rejecting some particular putatively Tractarian account of what makes some sentences nonsensical (say, an account based on illegitimate syntactical combination), while assuming that a resolute reader must share with the proponent of a standard sort of reading the idea that the charge of nonsense leveled at the end of the Tractatus is to be underwritten by some theory – be it one that is advanced within the body of the work or one that is imported into the work from the outside. These critics thereby assume that resolute readers must want to substitute some alternative theoretical account of the grounds of sense for the particular one under criticism.8 These critics then become understandably very puzzled about how a resolute reading can possibly be thought to be sustainable. For they assume that the discovery that there are no logically distinct kinds of nonsense is itself arrived at through the elaboration and application of a theory of sense that resolute readers are now committed to viewing as having somehow been successfully articulated by the author of the Tractatus, even though the propositions by means of which it is to have been artic- ulated have been relegated to the status of mere nonsense. This then leads to the criticism that a resolute reading renders the propositions of the book too seman- tically impoverished to be able to articulate the theoretical conceptions about the nature of nonsense that resolute readers are committed to ascribing to the work.
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